Expansión capitalista y transformaciones regionales

This book provides the reader with an innovative approach to the agrarian past of Argentina and helps fill important gaps. First, the book covers not only the pampas but also some interior provinces largely ignored by historiography. Second, it focuses on continuities and changes in Argentina’s agrarian past throughout the long nineteenth century. Third, unlike most work done on the agrarian history of Argentina, the book takes seriously the first half of the nineteenth century and does not treat it merely as a prologue to the boom of the pampas in the second half.The book revolves around two central themes: (1) the differential impact of capitalism on the agrarian economy of Argentina’s regions and their economic reorientation to meet the new demand; (2) and the existence of a medium- and small-landowning peasantry of colonial origins that persisted throughout the nineteenth century and set limits to the expansion of the large rural estate.The expansion of capitalism forced economic reorientations in the Argentine provinces. Several chapters refer to the business strategies developed by producers to cope with market demand. Jorge Gelman describes governor Juan Manuel de Rosas as a new brand of shrewd entrepreneur who diversified his investments in land following the swings of the market. He bought large estates located on the southern frontier of Buenos Aires to raise cattle and sheep for the international market, and smaller and more scattered plots in agricultural zones to grow grains for domestic consumption. Some continuities from previous times persisted, though. Studying inventories of the largest landowners in Buenos Aires around 1850, Juan Carlos Garavaglia finds a common investment pattern reminiscent of that of colonial times. It included not only estancias but also houses for rent in Buenos Aires (a less profitable but safer investment) as well as loans and government bonds. This investment pattern changed to an almost exclusive accumulation of land in the second half of the nineteenth century, as Andrea Reguera shows in her study of Ramón Santamarina, one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs of the pampas’ agricultural boom.In the cases of Mendoza and Córdoba (studied by Beatriz Bragoni and Rodolfo Richard Jorba, and Silvia Romano), it was the supply of wool to Buenos Aires and cattle to the Chilean mines respectively that articulated these provincial economies with the market. In both cases, it was a class of landowners/merchants (also reminiscent of colonial times) who benefited from market demand. The Mendoza entrepreneurs seemed to have been drawn more fully by the market as they bought or rented lands in the pampas to raise cattle, and sought business links with Chilean merchants to secure direct distribution.The book also introduces radical changes to the common vision of nineteenth-century Argentina’s agrarian landscape as dominated by the large rural estate or estancia. The authors reveal the existence of an important (numerically as well as in its involvement in production) sector of medium-size and small landowners in all the cases examined. In Buenos Aires their presence had already been studied thoroughly for the late colonial times but the findings for the interior are new. For nineteenth-century Buenos Aires Gelman finds that even in the context of the expansion of the estancias the “campesinos” (a word hardly applied a few years ago to Argentina’s rural population) competed for land with the large landowners and set a limit to the expansion of their holdings. As labor was very scarce, campesinos could also negotiate their participation in the job market. Therefore landowners (including governor Rosas) had to resort to incentives, mainly higher salaries, to lure the peasants to work as journeymen. Even at the end of the century a sector of small landowners still existed in the south of Buenos Aires and was largely associated with European immigrants.A very similar situation occurred in the interior provinces of Córdoba, Mendoza, and Tucumán, and in the expanding agrarian frontier of Entre Ríos. The most interesting case is that of Tucumán, home of the sugar industry in Argentina. As María Celia Bravo shows in her excellent chapter, the existence of a small landowning peasantry dating from colonial times limited the expansion of sugar plantations (ingenios). By 1850, as demand for sugar grew, the peasants shifted their production first from subsistence to market agriculture—to supply the ingenios and the growing population of the province—and later to sugar cane growing itself. By the end of the century these small landowners (called locally cañeros independientes) controlled 42 percent of the lands devoted to sugar cane growing.In sum, the editors of the book should be praised for putting together pieces of extremely good quality that are solidly grounded in archival research. This book is an important addition to the growing literature on Argentina’s agrarian history that is renewing long-held assumptions and endowing its historiography with a sophistication it lacked 20 years ago

Agrarian society · Agriculture · Art · Capitalism · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Estate · Famine · Geography · Historiography · Humanities · Peasant · Political science · Politics · Argentine historical studies · Indigenous Cultures and History · Latin American rural development

• El perfil económico de la elite de Buenos Aires en las décadas centrales del siglo XIX

  Open Access•Roy Hora•Revista de Historia Económica /…•2006

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